


Apology

by Wind_Ryder



Series: Novel Discussions [4]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Child Abuse, Coal Mining, discussions of rape/non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 03:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11774196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wind_Ryder/pseuds/Wind_Ryder
Summary: After the events of the Canterbury Tales, John Silver returns home to Savannah.  Only he's not really John Silver anymore, is he?





	Apology

**Author's Note:**

> By popular demand, here's the return of John Silver and the happy ending he deserves. 
> 
> You MUST have read the Canterbury Tales prior to this story or it will NOT make any sense.

 

 

> How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was—such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me—I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence.

 

James never remembers to wear his glasses.  They’re stupid fucking things.  They smudge too easily, are scratched almost constantly, and he never has them when he needs them.  Thomas sighs at him and tells him he’s an idiot, and they bicker over the blasted spectacles like they’re something James should care more about.  (He doesn’t).

But there’s a man standing in the garden.  Looking down at the row of rutabagas.  James does have the decency to remember the placement of things in his garden, thank you very much.  He just can’t quite make out who the man in the garden is meant to be.  Or if he knows him in the first place.

Grunting, he picks up the pace.  Leans more heavily on his walking stick, and tries to squint through the summer glare.  It takes him longer than it should to place the man’s face.  He blames home and years spent dreaming of this moment.  Blames heat and hunger and a bad temperament too.  “John,” he greets in what Thomas has described as his ‘quiet’ voice.  Years of standing too close to cannon fire has finally taken his toll.  James’ hearing had gone the way of his eyes.

Sometimes he hears just fine, other times it’s just the wrong pitch or octave.  He’s never quite known the difference.  Miranda could have told him.  Or Thomas, if he bothers to listen to the man lecture.  One good thing about hearing loss.  At least he has an excuse for when he doesn’t pay attention.

John’s aged well, James supposes.  He’s clean and put together.  His close are tailored nicely.  His crutch is in good shape.  He leans on it very little.  Balance still good and strong.  He turns his body fully so James can get a clean picture despite his limited field of vision.  

Gone are the boyish looks of the past.  Gone is his babyface and his slender nature.  Thick muscle around his shoulders and core are obvious despite his clothes.  He’s a stronger man.  A well practiced one.  There’s a bloody parrot on his shoulder.

“The fuck is that?” James asks in his Not Quiet voice.  Too loud by half, and he thinks even before he lost his hearing it should have been just about the right level of incredulity.

The smile, though.  That’s still the same.  John smiles at him all cheer and good humor and haunted eyes that lurk beneath a friendly demeanor.  “Captain Flint,” he says instead.  The parrot immediately starts to squawk.  

Shrill enough that James wishes he’d lost more of his hearing, if he were being entirely honest.  “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”  

“I named her after you.”  It makes no sense.  Until it does.

“You little shit,” James growls.  John’s smile grows.  The bird flaps and settles back as John lifts a practiced hand to stroke her bright feathers.  

He could have had a jaguar on his shoulder, and James still would have approached him.  Still would have crossed the space between them and drawn John to his chest in a fierce embrace.  John’s head crashes to his shoulder and the bird screams its protest, but James doesn’t care.  He cups the back of John’s head and he wraps his other arm around John’s body.

“My father’s dead,” John tells his collarbone.  James holds on tighter.  Waiting.  “Can I come home?”

“You never had to leave.”  It’s not the right answer.  John’s clinging to James as much as he was only moments before, but his body is coiled tense.  As tight as a bow string.  “You’re always welcome here, John.”

But between them all, it’s not James that John needs to resolve his quarrels with.  And James isn’t nearly foolish enough to believe that those quarrels will end with a foul parrot screaming at them as hugs are exchanged over the rutabagas.  James refuses to release him, though.  Urges him forward.  Up into the house.  Up the stairs.  

The parrot flies off John’s shoulder the moment they’re inside.  Screaming and kicking over cups.  Laughing to itself like the little she-demon it’s already turning out to be.  James sits John down on the bed.  The crutch falls to the floor, and John stares blankly.  It’s like his brain has somehow disconnected from the rest of him.  Like his body has finally found itself someplace it doesn’t quite know how to be.

So James helps.

He pulls off John’s fancy clothes.  Folds them and sets them to the side.  He fetches a basin of water and some cloth.  Sets to cleaning the dust from the road off John’s fingers.  His face.  His feet.  He washes John’s body, and he provides fresh clothes for him.  Gets him situated in every possible way.  

They barely talk.  They barely say anything at all.  Just a few grunts and nudges.  Inquiring sounds that lead to quietly hummed answers.  After all this time, James can still read John like a book.  He can still understand him.  Can still know what he wants.  

“John?” James whispers softly.  Staring at the face of a man he’d never been quite sure he’d see again.  John blinks languidly.  Slowly looking up at James.  Confusion flitting across his features.  

“I wasn’t sure what would happen if I were to return.”

“Madi and Geoff stay with us more often than not, but you thought we’d turn _you_ away?” James asks him sardonically.  He’s tried not to be bitter about it.  But after all these years, it’s hard not to.  Hard not to let the faintest traces of his irritability out.  

John had left Geoff behind when he’d gone off to chase after Billy Bones.  Israel Hands serving as his the dark whisper in his ear.  He’d sent for Madi once he’d managed to get himself settled in Bristol.  But he’d never come back to the house.  The closest he got once was a ship in Florida.  A letter. _I don’t want to take your son from you._  As if Geoff had been James’ to lose.  As if John hadn't lost Geoff when he left.

James would have argued more if he hadn’t gotten Geoff out of it.  If the reward for his silence hadn’t been to raise that boy and love him as his own.  To watch him grow, and argue with him over everything from laziness to why his father saw fit to leave him behind time and time again.

James loves that boy.  Thomas loves that boy.  

Even now, Geoff’s helping Thomas with the books at his shop.  Madi’s managing their inn.  They didn’t receive notice that John was coming home.  James considers the fact that really, no one knows.  John could leave now, this instant, and there would be nothing he could do about it.  

Well.  He could knock him out.  James considers all the different ways he could keep John here.  Force him to face his son and wife.  Force him to stay.  Tie him to the bed and keep him there.  Geoff’s thirteen now.  John should be home for him.  But if he leaves...they will go on loving that boy.  He's theirs.  And John at least knows that's true. 

“John?” James asks quietly.  He’s been quiet for too long.  Staring off somewhere in the middle distance.

“There was a child in my care,” John says suddenly.  He meets James’ eyes.  Tired and worn.  It’s been so many years since James has had a chance to look into John’s blue eyes.  To truly appreciate their color and texture.  He wants to touch John’s face.  Wants to embrace him again.  “Jim Hawkins,” John continues.  He’s staring at James, but it takes James a moment to realize that John’s not really _looking_ at him.  He’s just...keeping his lids open in James’ general direction.  “He shot Israel.  Threw his body overboard.”

Sounds like someone James would like to meet one day.  But that’s not why John’s here now.  “Tell me about your father,” James whispers quietly.  John doesn’t reply.  “Tell me something true.” They're old words.  Practiced words.  Generally met with lies more than anything else.  But this time, John replies.  Slowly.  Carefully.  Voice just loud enough for James to hear. 

“My father left when I was four or five.  He killed a man while they’d been drunk over cards and fled Ireland because of it.” John doesn’t meet James’ eyes as he speaks. Doesn’t try conveying the sincerity through any meaningful gaze.  “The man he killed hadn’t been anyone important.  But he’d had siblings.  Family.  After Israel left, they came to enact their revenge.  They raped my mother.  Over and over again.  All of them.  They took me away and the last time I saw her she was screaming on the floor.  Two men over her as they—” his voice breaks off.  

He’s trembling.  Hands shaking between his legs.  His breath is coming in short gasps.  James touches his hand and he flinches.  Recoils badly.  Startled so much that James honestly doesn’t know if John realizes where he is.  If he understands that they’re here in Savannah, and not back in whatever shit hole Irish town he’d been born to.  John stares at him.  But there’s no focus there.  No frame of reference.

Decades ago, John had avoided this story.  Had filled in the spaces with lies and gaps.  His mother couldn’t have been raped if she was dead and he an orphan in Whitechapel.  His father couldn’t have just abandoned them to their fate if he was buried in a hole.  “You look like your mother,” James murmurs.  He runs a hand through John’s dark hair.  Relishes how John turns into his touch.  His skin is cool and clammy.  His eyes close tight.  The only thing that marks him his father’s son.  Blue eyes.  

James can imagine what John’s mother would have looked like.  An Irish woman with a dark complexion and dark hair.  Brown eyes, and ancestors who have lived on the island for generations.  James and Israel came from a different stock.  A lineage filled with viking blood and a rebellious spirit.  But John’s came from the land.  What a twisted fate.  Caught between both lines with no guide to lead him onwards.

“I don’t remember her,” John says quietly.  “I was too young.  I just remember that night.  The last night I saw her.  I remember her screaming.  The sound of clothes ripping.  Food burning on the fire.  I remember—” he cuts himself of again.  Fingers twitching badly.  James almost wants to tell him to stop.  That that’s enough.   But John’s finally talking now, and if this is the only time he can say it, James can’t stop him.  “They were going to kill me.”

Blue eyes meet green.  Tears are at the corners.  James can practically _feel_ John’s heart racing.  Desperately fast.  “They brought me to this man...I think he was the father or grandfather, I never found out.  He had a knife at my throat, said my father ran off to be a pirate after he’d proven himself a murderous bastard.  And this man...he was going to kill me.  I knew that.  Kill me for retribution, but...he sold me instead.  To work the mines in Newcastle.”

Something very cold, and very dark started digging away at James’ consciousness.  It gripped his mind with vicious claws and it held on frighteningly tight.  His fingers flexed without his permission.  His rage started to simmer in the back of his mind.

The coal mines of Newcastle were _horrific._  They’d been the topic of discussion in the salons of London for God’s sake.  Flooding and collapses were common.  The air noxious.  As a child, John would have been set to work as either a horsedriver or a collier.  As young as he was, he might have just started by fetching tools.  “You saw the announcements there,” James murmurs.  “Of happenings going on.  Reminding everyone how much they hated each other more than their foremen.”

His boy, because John’s always been _his,_ nods wordlessly.  

James tries to imagine John as a coal stained youth.  Crawling through the darkened tunnels.  Dragging carts through tiny little crevices.  Shivering in the dark.  Tries to imagine him as his light goes out and he’s trapped in never-ending black.  Terrified and alone of the things that could come for him.  

“There’s no one to see anything down there,” John whispers.  “When things go wrong.”  His voice is getting softer and softer.  Sweat is beading at his brow.  He’s working himself up to this conclusion, and James hates seeing it.  Hates seeing how John’s whole body is twisting itself into knots in a valiant attempt to press on with a story he _doesn’t_ want to tell.  “They’re all dead.”

“Who?”

“It collapsed.  It kept collapsing and I—” John ducks his head into his hands.  “I don’t know why I never died.  I don’t know why they always—”

That’s enough.  James knows enough for this.  Knows enough to understand _this._ He tugs John to his chest.  He crushes him there.  He can see it all.  Like a painting set out before him.  He can see John growing in the cold and dark of a Newcastle mine.  Can see him crawling through the damp.  Rats nipping at his fingers and toes.  Can see him befriending the older miners, and he can see him getting knocked to the side and bearing witness as every person he ever came to love died.

Over and over again.

Rape and death and despair.  He can see it all rolling out.  Until John finally has the strength to run away.  To abandon the mine and anyone who knew who he was.  Irish accent beaten out of him after years in England.  Education likely picked up from local schoolmasters who fetched the children from the mine in vague parliament efforts to provide education.  James had heard of the endeavors.  Had heard Thomas complaining how it was never enough.

 _They know their ABCs at least,_ Thomas had said once.  And James imagines John’s clever mind latching to that bit of knowledge and using it as he navigated.  As he learned how to read the maps of the mines.  As he caught glimpses of documents in the foreman’s office.  John’s an autodidact if there ever was one, and James only wishes he could have found John fifteen years earlier.  Found him before he became a broken child desperate to escape a life he hadn’t meant to live.

When John finally pulls away, he’s no better off.  He’s still a scared and trembling mess.  Still a broken man who grew up as the result of a fractured life.  He’d been right.  All those years ago.  There is no meaning that can be derived from a story like that.  There is no explanation why miners would continue to go into the dark.  Why they continued to reach into the pits of nothingness in attempts to pull out something good.  Why they died in the effort.  But James can see so clearly now the twist of logic that drove John to commit his act that first time they reached Skeleton Island.

He can see so clearly how John had collapsed inward.   _This is just another mine.  This war is just another endless pit of despair, and everyone is going to die except for me.  I’m going to watch everyone die again._ John hadn’t told him the truth, because he’d have known that James would have seen it for what it was.  He’d have known that John would betray him in the end.  Would try to save Madi and James and not the war.  Because John never cared about the mine.  Never cared about the war.  He cared about the people who kept dying.  The ones who he tried to matter to.

_Where else would you matter?_

He’d never mattered to anyone before.  The foreman likely saw him as a tool to be used and abused.  The men likely ignored him or beat him.  The few people who saw him as a person and treated him kindly, by John’s own admission, died in the worst form of agony.  Crushed to death.  Choked.  Drowned.  

There is no justice in that.

James remembers John’s first few times out at sea.  Remembers watching him look out at the ocean as if it were something he’d never quite get used to.  For someone who grew up surrounded by tight walls and enclosed spaces, the vast ocean likely felt too much.  Too catastrophically grand.  Unnatural and wrong.  

He thinks, suddenly, of Muldoon.  Of how John had been with him when he died.  Watching as he’d been pinned beneath the water.  Drowning in cramped quarters with only a swinging lantern as their light.  How often had John seen that exact thing?

“Socrates was perhaps one of the greatest philosophers in Greece,” James tells John softly.  “A natural and gifted orator, he charmed many and infuriated others.  So many, in fact, that he was brought up on charges for not believing in the gods, and for corrupting the youth.” John blinks at him.  Owlishly.  His fingers twist and turn so they cling to James’.  After all this time, it’s nice to know that John still trusts him with this.  

James keeps his voice low and quiet as he talks.  Gentling John as he holds John’s hand close.  “He said plainly he believed in the gods, and that his corruption can only be that of a simple matter of discussion.  He speaks the truth, and because it’s a truth others don’t agree with—they put him to death.  He found no shame in the death, and he felt that death would lead him to the people he longed to speak with.  Homer, and all the other great philosophers, writers, and heroes of the past.

“He stood before all the senate of Athens, and he asked them, ‘Had Achilles any thought of death and danger? For wherever a man’s place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything, but of disgrace.’”  John flinches.  He’s not taking the right meaning of the conversation.  Not understanding James’ point, elliptical though it may be.  

“When Billy stole you off the Maroon Island.  When he put you in that place and left you there, you never told him about us.  Never told him about Thomas or I.  Knowing it would lead to your death.  Knowing the only other option for you _was_ death.  And yet you let him torture you.  Let him abandon you to die on an island you never thought you’d escape from.  Not caring about death and danger.  Caring only of the consequences of speaking what you knew.”

“Are you telling me that my choice to hunt Billy, after all these years, hasn’t been anything other than cowardice?” John growls out.  He’s never liked tender touch or affection.  But logic is logic, and John cannot deny it when it’s presented properly.

“I’m telling you, that when you left here all those years ago, when you started this quest, you had what you didn’t have then.  You had a son.  Have a son.  You have family.  Madi, Thomas, and I.  You held your boy in your arms and you thought about it, didn’t you?” John starts twisting away, but James holds him in place.  Squeezes his hands.  Tugs him until John’s pretty blue eyes meet his once more.  “Tell me you didn’t think about Billy coming here for revenge.  Tell me you didn’t hear that he’d never gone to get that chest, and that could only mean it had never been about the chest in the first place.   _Tell me_ you didn’t think about Billy coming here, killing your family, raping your wife, and sending your boy into a cold dark place to crawl in the damp as work for his food.”

John can’t.  James can see it now.  How Israel twisted John’s mind.  How he manipulated him with the ones he loved.  How he carefully brought the argument into place so John couldn’t refute it.  Couldn’t escape.  James has been given the privilege to raise John’s son.  To watch Geoffrey grow up and be a happy child.  A good working lad.  One who can read and write and lead just as well as his parents.  He’s never known the dark despair of John’s childhood.  And John’s efforts had been for exactly that.

“You put an end to it all,” James whispers.  He kisses John’s lips.  Feels how John sags against him.  How he jerks his hands free just so he can pull James even closer.  Until they’re tipping back onto the bed and cradling each other’s bodies.

“Socrates died in the end,” John tells James as he relishes the feeling of John pressed so close against him.

“So did Billy,” James whispers.  “So did you.”

“Did I?”

“What’s your name, John?” His lover is quiet for a moment.  Quiet and contemplative.

“You know, when they gave me the name, it had been a joke.  They’d sent me to mine coal, but called me Silver instead.  I’m sure they found it fucking hilarious.”  It’s not an answer.  So James waits for one.  Waits as John slowly turns his head.  So they lay there, nose to nose.  “It’s Shae,” John whispers.  He doesn’t have a lilt.  There’s no magical return to an accent he used as a toddler and never again.  But he whispers the name like it means something special.  Something he kept close to himself when men who beat him for being the son of an Irish bastard tried to mock him for who he was.

The name is sacred.  And so James treats it as such.  He slips in close and kisses the lips that breathed life into the name abandoned by a child in the worst conditions imaginable.  “Welcome home, Shae,” he greets softly into John’s ear.  He feels John shudder as he moves in closer.  Pressing in tight against the long lines of James’ body.  “The war is won.”

 _“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live.  Which is better, God only knows.”_ James smiles as John quotes Socrates to perfection.  He leans back, and meets John’s eyes.  

Once, he’d thought he’d seen the transition John had started to make from Long John Silver to something else entirely.  He’d known that if pushed too hard in either direction, it could break the fragile soul of a man trying desperately to recover from its plunge into darkness.  It took James fifteen years to escape his hell.  He isn’t surprised it’s taken John the same amount of time.

Back then, John had let Israel whisper in his ear.  Let the man drive his fear and terror.  Let him pull the trigger on his hysteria.  Sending him headlong into a fight that he’d always been unlikely to finish.  John had loved them too much and too fiercely to let any harm come to them.  He needed to be sure they’d be okay.  That they’d all be okay.  So he left his son with James, left his wife to be cared for by Thomas, and he’d fled with a man who caused the broken trail of destruction from the start.

Because that man had always been capable of being a guiding force in John’s life.  And now he was dead, and Billy was gone forever, and John is finally at home.  James isn’t foolish enough to think that John’s final words had been meant for him.  Nor even that it had been _John_ who’d said them.

John’s dead and buried.  Just like all the other monsters in this tale.

“What’s your name?” James asks again, this time to be sure.  Blue eyes, and a well loved face look back at him.  

A slow smile, no hint of malice or pain or suffering in sight, forms.  Quiet and sweet.  A four year old soul emerging from a hole he’d hidden in.  Eager for a chance to breathe clean air.  To be loved and cherished as he always should have been.  “Shae,” he says.  His voice grows in strength.  “My name is Shae.”

“McGraw?” James offers.  Because fuck Israel Hands and whatever his patronym had been.  James isn’t letting that man have any more influence on their lives.  Thomas has already taken James’ name, why not Shae too?

“McGraw,” Shae repeats.  “Shae McGraw.” Their brows touch.  “I’m home.”

“Welcome home.”

It took twenty years from start to finish, but the war is over.  Finally, there’s peace.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes are taken from the Harvard Classics 
> 
> "The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito of Plato", translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1980


End file.
